WND EXCLUSIVE

Iran: U.N. nuke inspectors are spies

Look who's attacking WND report on Fordow explosions

Reza Kahlili, author of the award-winning book "A Time to Betray," served in CIA Directorate of Operations, as a spy in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, counterterrorism expert; currently serves on the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, an advisory board to Congress and the advisory board of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran (FDI). He regularly appears in national and international media as an expert on Iran and counterterrorism in the Middle East.

The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization Wednesday accused the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog of leaking confidential information on Iran’s nuclear program.

Fereydoon Abbasi, in an announcement on the organization’s website, also insinuated that some inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency work for foreign intelligence agencies. He said that because the agency does not have adequate security, Iran should not provide it with sensitive information.

Abbasi said the media did not uncover any secrets on Iran’s nuclear program, but that the IAEA did leak reports to the media. Although he mentioned reports on the installation of new-generation centrifuges at Natanz, he has not yet confirmed or denied explosions at the Fordow plant.

WND reported exclusively on Jan. 24 that explosions rocked Iran’s nuclear facility at Fordow on Jan. 21 with updates on Jan. 27,29, 30,31, and Feb. 3 and 6. The blasts at first trapped 219 workers, including 16 North Koreans. The bodies of at least 40 people, including two North Koreans, have been recovered.

Iranian media reported Wednesday that the IAEA and the Islamic regime had failed for a second time in less than a month to agree on further inspections of Iran’s nuclear activities.

Since WND’s initial report on the explosions, all Iranian media have avoided mentioning Fordow, after initially denying the incident occurred.

As reported in a WND update, a high-ranking Iranian diplomat serving in Asia said the regime has ordered a total news blackout on the Fordow incident, referring only to statements by the White House and IAEA. A former Iranian diplomat now in Tehran verified the order and said that since the WND report, the regime’s Supreme National Security Council has met several times and issued directives to all of its branches on the Fordow incident.

Two days after WND’s initial report on Fordow, Iran notified the IAEA of its intention to install its new-generation centrifuges at Natanz and it now has informed the IAEA that the installation has already begun and that it plans to install thousands more. The regime had 2,700 of these machines, which enrich uranium at a much faster speed, at Fordow.

Al-Manar, a Lebanese TV station affiliated with the terrorist group Hezbollah, echoed a claim by the Islamic regime’s official news agency IRNA and other media that the author of the WND reports, Reza Kahlili, is a lying defector and that Hamidreza Zaker, a former Iranian intelligence officer who has provided information on the Fordow incident, is another defector notorious for lying.

In a bizarre comparison, Al-Manar said that in the run-up to the Iraq war, many publications, including The New York Times, put out false reports about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, which the Bush administration used as a pretext to war. No WMDs were ever found.

Al-Manar is under the direct supervision of the office of Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah who was placed on the U.S. terrorist list in 2004.The media organization is funded by Iran and is used as a propaganda machine against Israel and America.

Al-Manar referred to the White House statement that called the WND report not credible and said that the IAEA backed Iran’s denial of the incident. It said Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful, stating that, “U.S. officials have recently said that the assessment included in the 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, which claims that there is no evidence whatever of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, remains the consensus view of the U.S.’s 16 intelligence agencies.”

Al-Manar claimed WND’s report is a part of an Israeli campaign to spread false information on the Iranian nuclear program and that shortly after the initial WND story, the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot supported the WND report, which was echoed by the Times of London’s sources in Israeli intelligence.

“Recently and after having scored a heavy defeat in the last parliamentary elections, where he and his right-wing partner Avigdor Lieberman lost 25 percent of their seats in the Knesset, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to hide his current political weakness by shifting the public’s attention to Iran,” Al-Manar said. “In his ‘victory speech,’ he insisted that his first challenge would be preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.”

IRNA, in a report Jan. 30, called WND a “mouthpiece of the CIA” and Kahlili a CIA agent whose reporting was mere propaganda by the West before the start of renewed negotiations between Iran and the 5-plus-1 powers – the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China, plus Germany. The next round of talks is set to take place on Feb. 26 in Kazakhstan.

In what may be an ominous development, North Korea conducted another nuclear bomb test one day prior to President Obama’s State of Union Address. Iran and North Korea collaborate closely on their missile and nuclear bomb programs, and as reported in December 2010, Iranian scientists monitor North Korean tests.

With both North Korea and Iran having launched satellites into space, a sign of intercontinental ballistic missile delivery capability, a source in the Revolutionary Guards intelligence division said that with Monday’s test in North Korea of a more powerful and more militarized bomb, the two countries are much closer to clearing the last obstacle to arming their missiles with nuclear warheads.